Writing about the food, farmers, fishermen, and folk of Long Island's North Fork.

Television

11/21/2017

In the days when television was something to be enjoyed in the living room with family and friends, Bill Persky was the guy who wrote your favorite shows.

Sitcoms were his specialty. Scripts for “The Dick van Dyke Show,” and his work on “That Girl” and “Kate & Allie” brought him five Emmys, and for those who lived through that particular Golden Age of TV, a lot of joy.

Bill and his wife, Joanna, spend summers and weekends in a house on Burro Hall Lane that they built in the late 1990s after leaving increasingly hectic Sag Harbor. The plot of a sitcom episode is nascent in Bill’s stated reasons for their move to the Island. “You get off the ferry and it’s 1940. No wars have taken place,” he said. “You got nothing fancy. I was going to make risotto and the IGA had never heard of arborio rice.”

Bill made a glorious career writing about the ordinary experiences of his own life in an extraordinary way. “My writing isn’t about jokes, it’s writing about what is going on and finding a twist to it that makes it funny,” Bill said. “I get into situations that look like they couldn’t happen in real life.”

In a sense, he said, his father was in the entertainment business, a seller of estates in auction galleries located wherever wealthy people gathered on vacation.

It meant the family moved frequently from one resort to the next. Bill recalls being the first Jewish person in the school system of Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he attended Ramble Elementary School in a location so remote that during recess, one of his classmates was bitten by a rattlesnake.

During summers in the early 1950s, Bill worked there as a lifeguard, soaking up the world of Borscht Belt entertainers who radiated around Grossingers during the high season.

He studied advertising at Syracuse University, landed a job at a New York ad agency, and brought a Brooks Brothers seersucker suit, a straw hat and an attaché case. “The only thing I carried in it was people’s lunch, because I was a gopher,” he said. “My attaché case smelled like a delicatessen.”

Bill met Sam Denoff, who would be his writing partner for many years, when they both worked at WNEW in the continuity department.

“When I took the job, I had no idea what the continuity department was, but for $30 a week I figured you didn’t have to be a brain surgeon,” Bill said.

Bill and Sam had to schedule the show for the DJs, so they would know what came next while on the air. They started writing jokes for the DJs to fill in, mostly to entertain themselves. The head of the station liked what he heard, and told them to write some more.

In the 1960s, Los Angeles had become the center of the entertainment industry, and the writing team moved out to write for “The Steve Allen Show.” When Bill was 32, he and Sam were hired by Carl Reiner for “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” which was the most sought-after writing job in television.

The first episode Bill and Sam wrote is still one of the most influential and best-loved 25 minutes of TV ever recorded. “That’s My Boy??” came from Bill’s experience at the hospital after the birth of his first child.

“We got some flowers that were meant for somebody else and somebody else’s dinner, and finally I said ‘How do you know you get the right baby?’” The episode aired in 1963 and included an African-American couple on an otherwise all-white show.

Director Carl Reiner got the CBS censors in a twitch by threatening to quit if they changed the ending, which was hilarious, and progressive at a time when integration and social change were rippling through American society.

Only eight years older than Bill, Carl Reiner had served in World War II and Bill looked up to him. “I thought of him as a totally grown up older man who could have been my father,” he said. Reiner is now 94 and just finished a book titled, “Too Busy to Die.”

“Sometimes when you work with someone, you take away a piece of them, and it becomes part of your DNA, especially the good ones,” Bill said. “There’s a little bit of Carl Reiner running around in me.”

Bill’s not so sure about the the so-called Golden Age of television because he thinks there’s more than one. “The golden age is any time a new dimension comes to it,” he said. He pointed out that in his day, with three prime-time hours a night and three channels, there were only a handful of shows on the air.

Now there might be 40 shows in the same time period. “It’s a much more lucrative business to be in in terms of getting jobs,” he said.

Bill said some of the best material he’s ever seen is being done now, and there’s an overwhelming volume of easy-access, televised entertainment, “The only place in our house you can’t watch television is on the toaster,” he said.

Bill’s “three amazing daughters,” with his first wife, are a huge source of satisfaction for him. His oldest, Dana, is a neuropsychologist in L.A. Jamie owns the restaurant Plate in Stowe, Vermont, and Liza is a television producer.

When Bill met Joanna Patton, a New York advertising executive, he’d been married twice before. “It was worth all I went through just to be available to her,” he said. They’ve been married for more than 20 years.

Life on Shelter Island is “The Bill and Joanna” show, home-centered, revolving around Joanna’s gardening and the antics of Sassy, an attention-loving red dog who came to them through a Shelter Island dog rescue organization.

“Some people it’s not glitzy enough for them,” Bill said. “Everyone is here for the same reason.”

01/23/2017

There’s one picture of Becky Cole that she can stand looking at. It was taken in 2005, when she and other members of the Writers Guild were on strike outside Wainscott Studios.

She held up a sign with three rows of numbers that the strikers flipped to count the days of their protest. When they got close to 100 days, someone took a picture of Becky with her sign and it ran in The East Hampton Star.

“I looked a little ragged,” she said. “But also bemused and defiant. I like that.”

Becky grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a 1960s household she described as “bohemian” led by parents who were well-educated and creative. Bernard Cole was a photojournalist with assignments allowing him to travel widely and often. Becky’s mother, Gwen, was an artist who created detailed, exquisitely-drafted works.

Although Becky was an only child, she had a half brother and sister from her father’s first marriage; siblings she only got to know when she was nearly grown. “As an only child, I spent a lot of time alone,” she said. “I think it’s where a lot of my creativity came from.”

Becky’s parents were introduced to Shelter Island in the 1950s, spending summers here when Becky was 6. “I lived in the city, but I grew up out here,” she said. “There is something about that yearly check in — you come out and stay till Labor Day, unstructured time. Total freedom.”

A good student in grade school, in junior high Becky began to struggle with what would be diagnosed years later as dyslexia. By the time she was 17, she dropped out of high school, moved out of her parent’s apartment and went to work. “I was in a hurry to grow up,” she said.

Her first job was in a studio that did work for catalogs, setting up jewelry to be photographed. Assigned to arrange 140 wedding bands for a shoot, her arm was twitching somewhere in the middle of the second day of ring-arranging and she knocked half of them over. She was immediately reassigned. Her boss told her he needed a way to keep track of the jewelry that came in to be photographed, and Becky established a merchandise control system to do it.Next, she wrote advertising copy for jewelry catalogs, “going to the thesaurus and making a list of synonyms for scintillating, brilliant and exquisite,” she remembered.

Becky moved into medical writing, supporting herself writing about disease, health and nutrition. A book-packager hired her to write books on fiber in the diet, and when she got a call about working on a book to be called “Loving Longer,” she guessed correctly it was a study of premature ejaculation. “They wanted me because of my medical background,” she said, “but they really just needed a writer.”

Becky wrote a script for the televisions series, “Cagney and Lacey,” that was made into the episode, “Right to Remain Silent,” which aired in 1986. Although she was paid almost nothing, it got her into the Screenwriter’s Guild. Starting in 1990, Becky was a staff writer for “One Life to Live,” responsible for a script every week, and sometimes two or three. She loved the work and the people she worked with until new management came in, fired the film and theater people who had been producing the program and replaced them with marketing executives.

When a new producer asked for a story line involving a romantic relationship between two characters, the unintentionally cringe-worthy plot twist was shelved when one of the long-time writers informed the executive that the characters she wanted to marry each other were brother and sister.

In 1994, when the soap won the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series Writing Team, Becky was one of the eight writers honored. “We walked off stage, were handed our Emmys and were busy noticing that it’s really easy to stab yourself with the wings — very pointy! And there was Gladys Knight walking towards us saying she loved the show.” Becky said. “It was a very warm few minutes.”

As part of Shelter Island Library’s series Friday Night Dialogues, Becky will discuss her experiences writing for the soaps on Friday, January 20.

She had kept up her relationship with Shelter Island, even when living and working in the city. Her mother and father were full-time residents once they retired, and after her father died in 1992, she continued to spend extended time on the Island with her mother, moving out to care for her in 2000, and eventually inheriting the family home on South Ferry Road where she lives.

Becky admits to a few missed opportunities. “I wanted to marry, I wanted to have kids, but I missed all my deadlines,” she said, “Those are huge regrets in my life.”

After leaving the world of daytime drama, Becky worked refinishing furniture, a skill she learned early in life from her uncle. She is also an active volunteer, especially when editing and writing is involved. She’s worked with the 2Rs4Fun program that helps Shelter Island School students improve their writing and reading skills, and she offers editing and writing expertise in the Ferry Writers group that meets twice a month.

For almost a year, Becky has run a popular Shakespeare reading group at the library, preparing extensive notes to stimulate the group discussion for each play the group reads.

“It is truly the best thing in my life,” she said. “I love that prep work.”

She claims the distinction of sharing a bed with William Shakespeare, since the entire left side of her bed is “all books on Will. He takes up a little more than half the bed — he’s kind of a sprawler.”

Becky likes some of the changes she’s witnessed on the Island over the years. For example, when she was growing up this was one of the most conservative voting districts in the country, but in the last two presidential elections the Island voted for Obama and for Clinton, a development she observed as a poll-watcher. She also cites a more open-minded attitude toward people moving here from off-Island.

“I think it has become much easier for an outsider to get into Island life,” she said. “I think the movement of so many summertime people to become full time residents had something to do with it.”

11/26/2016

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Birds of a feather flocking on an Island split rail fence this week.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on November 23, 2016

Since 1621, Thanksgiving in America has brought together people who don’t agree, but still need to get along.

English colonists in Plymouth, Massachusetts, surprised to have survived a year in the New World, shot enough birds to feed themselves and their new Native American neighbors. The feast lasted for three days. Although this is thought to be the first Thanksgiving, it wasn’t widely celebrated until George Washington made a Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1789. Abraham Lincoln made it a federal holiday in 1863.

In this election year, chances are better than ever that someone sitting near me at the Thanksgiving table will disagree violently with my political views. If Native Americans were willing to eat turkey with English immigrants, maybe I should be willing to overlook my sister’s penchant for conspiracy theories so we can all enjoy the pumpkin pie in peace.

In my husband’s family, the Thanksgiving of 1968 was a year of atypical intergenerational hostilities. In other words, they yelled at each other. The war in Vietnam had splintered many American families along political lines, fortunately at his family’s get-together televised football along with excellent turkey helped distract the combatants.

In the early 1980’s my sister, Judith, came home at Thanksgiving and announced she was a vegetarian, a scene repeated all over the country, as college-age people discovered that in order to eat meat, it was necessary to kill animals. Convinced that her decision not to eat bird was an implicit criticism of our family’s way of life, a rejection of tradition, and an attention-getting ploy, my father decreed there would be no tofurkey at his table. The roast on the dining table was a paternalistic cudgel wielded to remind my sister of the sanctity of tradition.

More tolerant households that served tofurkey to their vegetarian offspring found having to eat the stuff was punishment enough for children who willfully broke with tradition.

One way to keep peace at Thanksgiving is to involve troublemakers in a project. Deep-frying the bird, which requires a lot of people to help, works well. Only a fool would attempt to fry a turkey anywhere near the house, and yet every year scores of Americans immolate their garages on Thanksgiving. (Underwriter’s Laboratory, refers to turkey fryers as “vertical flame throwers.”)

According to my friend, Jennifer, keeping an eye on the turkey fryer kept her Texas relatives positively engaged during their annual Thanksgiving festivities in San Antonio; it takes a village to keep the little ones out of the backyard while the fryer is in operation.

Another strategy for diffusing interpersonal tensions at Thanksgiving — introduce a side dish so provocative that people who don’t like each other bond in outrage. That’s why Marilyn Monroe’s Stuffing recipe made an appearance at our Thanksgiving in 2010, an elaborate recipe that includes sourdough bread, liver, raisins, three kinds of nuts, chopped eggs and parmesan cheese, or at least one ingredient to alarm everyone. Although it came from the kitchen of a beloved celebrity not previously known for her cooking prowess, those brave enough to try it had a delicious lesson in setting aside prejudice.

I have resolved not to let differences of opinion with my family and friends ruin Thanksgiving, but I can’t promise peace with the animal kingdom. The increase in Shelter Island’s wild turkey population has been so dramatic over the past few years, that the birds have crossed the line from charming reminder of our precious rural lifestyle to a ravening, pea-headed plague of backyards and parking lots. I have seen a turkey chase a man back into his car.

When I ride my bicycle around a flock of turkeys they do not yield for me, even if I sound my little bell. I recently rode past a dozen of them perched on a fence on Manhanset Road, and I swear I heard one of them say, “You hold her down, I’ll peck around her ears.”

09/02/2016

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Bob Markell in his attic studio with a self-portrait, painted, he said, when he was angry with himself.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on September 2, 2016

When Bob Markell was 8 years old he got the measles, and was treated by a doctor who praised his young patient’s artistic ability. “He was just being nice, but I believed him,” Bob said.

From then on, he was determined to be a painter, but his father objected, “You are going to live in an attic, you are going to starve, and I’m not going to pay for it,” he was told.

More than eight decades later, Bob’s father’s predictions have come true except for the starving part. First came 50 years as a designer, producer and executive in television, five Emmys, and distinguished work such as art director for the film “12 Angry Men” in 1957, and the first televised production of “The Nutcracker.” Since the early 1990s, Bob has focused on fine art, and in August welcomed visitors to his well-lit attic studio filled with sketches and paintings during the ArtSI studio tour.

Bob was born in 1924 and raised in Roxbury, Massachusetts. His mother had emigrated from Russia, but his father’s family was “more Americanized,” and deeply cynical. “My father had a negative view,” Bob said. “He really didn’t believe that when people were nice to him they meant it.”

Bob went to Northeastern University and graduated in 1944 with a degree in civil engineering and some work experience at a Boston architecture firm. He and everyone he knew wanted to go fight Hitler, but asthma prevented him from combat; he ended up at Grumman Aircraft on Long Island doing stress analysis on airplanes. After World War II, Grumman began manufacturing canoes, but lacking the same enthusiasm for peacetime canoes he had for wartime airplanes, Bob left in hope of more creative work.

He and two roommates had been living in a house near Grumman when he found all of his belongings on the porch. The landlady declared she didn’t want foreigners (i.e. Bob, a Jew) in her home. So in 1946, Bob and his friends moved to New York City, and he decided to try his hand at set design.

His first experience was at a summer-stock theater in the Catskills, a bowling alley that had been converted to a theater, where he painted a set but failed to seal it with the adhesive known as “rabbit glue.” By the next day all the paint had run off, and someone said, “You didn’t forget to put the rabbit glue on, did you?”

“I didn’t forget,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

Bob met his wife, Joan Harris, in 1948 when she showed up as a volunteer stagehand for an Equity Library Theatre production in New York. Bob was the scenic designer. A Chicago native, Joan was a Northwestern University theater program graduate and moved to New York to pursue acting. When she didn’t get cast, she dressed the set.

“I said, ‘Listen, any of you guys know how to light a show?’” Bob said. “And she went up the ladder, and was hanging on, and I said, ‘Anyone who would climb up and hang lights for me is worth knowing.’” They married in 1949.

Bob and Joan have two children, Mariana Markell, a nephrologist at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and Denis Markell, a dramatist and novelist, whose latest book, a young adult novel called “Click Here to Start,” was published in July.

In 1966, Bob was a producer on the classic courtroom drama series, “The Defenders,” when he worked with Dustin Hoffman.

The young actor’s role was a New York accountant, and Bob told Hoffman — at the time considered too homely to play a leading man — that he’d have to cut his long hair for the part. Hoffman insisted that Bob be present during the haircut so Bob could listen to him scream (something about Samson and Delilah). “They gave him a really nice haircut and he looked great,” said Bob. “I think he got the job on “The Graduate” because of the haircut, so he kind of owed me.”

The day Bob got the assignment that would lead to his fifth Emmy, he almost blew it. He said he had been drinking when the call came from CBS higher-ups to come discuss a promotion and new assignment.

“I couldn’t get any ice cubes and I heard myself say, ‘I can’t come now, I’m waiting for my refrigerator to be fixed.’” He managed to make it to the meeting, was promoted to executive producer, and assigned to a project called “Bicentennial Minutes,” a series of hundreds of 60-second historical sketches that aired from 1974 through 1976.

CBS had undertaken “Bicentennial Minutes” as public service announcements; under Bob’s direction they were each tiny dramas with a beginning, middle and end. Norman Mailer, President Gerald Ford, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and First Lady Betty Ford were among the celebrities who participated, and in 1975 Bob received an Emmy as executive producer of the series.

When Tennessee Williams was asked to do a New Year’s Eve Bicentennial Minute, the hard-drinking writer insisted on writing his own script, but the script didn’t materialize and it came time to shoot. “He was so smashed you couldn’t believe it,” Bob said. “He just looked into the camera and said, ‘This is Tennessee Williams and I want to offer all of you a happy, happy New Year and a happy holiday!’ Someone asked me, ‘Who wrote this thing?’”

In 1960, Bob and Joan were living in Brooklyn Heights when friends suggested a visit to Shelter Island. They visited, bought a house on the Island, and in 1976 they moved into their current home on Midway Road, an antique beauty built by a whaler, Captain Samuel Sherman, in the early 19th century.

In October 1977, Dashiell Hammett’s “The Dain Curse,” starring James Coburn, with Bob as executive producer, became the first major motion picture to be filmed on Shelter Island.

Bob told The New York Times that the absence of traffic lights and antennas and the plentiful supply of photogenic Victorian homes was a factor in CBS’s decision to film here, but more important was the willingness of local people, such as Williette Piccozzi, Louis Cicero and then Supervisor Leonard Bliss to support the production as extras, with haircuts — Louis’ cut, short with sideburns, became known as “The Dain Cut” — and with their tolerance of the weeks-long disruption of Island life.From his first visits to Shelter Island, Bob felt his creative juices flow.

His friends here were members of the Shelter Island Community of Artists, including Gus Mosca, and Luiz Coelho, now gone.

“They were marvelous, and helped me more than anyone else,” Bob said. “I miss them terribly.”

In his painting, Bob tries to reveal the emotions in his subjects. “You have to feel something,” he said. “Every time I get angry at myself, I do a self-portrait. When I paint someone else, I’m very concerned about insulting them, so I don’t do portraits that well, but I love painting myself.”

Last Sunday afternoon four deer loitered by the screened porch of the house on Midway Road. A six-point buck sat regally in the grass, with two does standing nearby and between them a spotted fawn on long, gawky legs. A cottontail rabbit hopped nearby.

Even by Shelter Island standards, this was an extraordinary assemblage. Did these ruminants sense they were gathered under the gaze of a celebrated designer, and formed this bucolic tableau, hoping to catch the artist’s eye?

01/11/2016

Wednesday was Epiphany, the end of six weeks of family get-togethers that began with Thanksgiving. In my family, three all-day feasts, four birthdays and a boozy brunch featuring unlimited shrimp cocktail marked this juggernaut of forced togetherness and winter sports, conducted in the caffeine-soaked frenzy of high-calorie foods.

This year, the holiday celebrations went particularly well.

We are Jewish and Christian and atheist and some of us have a spiritual life that we prefer not to label. We all like to eat, but not the same things. We have some locavores, some vegetarians, a pescatarian, a vegan and someone who only eats sweets (is she a sugartarian or a desserter?) And everyone, with the exception of the family dogs, is a critic.

This year several things did not happen. During a gathering at my mother’s home in Reno, Nevada, her ancient beagle did not climb onto the kitchen table — marvelous, at his age! — and eat an entire pan of stuffing while the family was gathering for Christmas dinner in the dining room. Not this year.

We did not prepare and consume foods that no one likes, such as plum pudding, a dish that sounds like it should be delicious, but never achieved greatness in our home, accompanied by something called hard sauce, which sounds like it should be inedible, but is delicious.

For many years my father read aloud the story of Jesus’ birth from the New Testament, but he didn’t read it straight. He added asides that were not part of the King James Version to see if the kids were paying attention. In particular his pronunciation of the word “myrrh” in Matthew 2.11 was baroque. He said it in a kind of multisyllabic vibrato that ended with a guttural noise that today we call vocal fry. He fried the heck out of myrrh.

My father has passed away, but we have kept alive his tradition of reading aloud to the children on Christmas Eve, with a new selection of sacred texts. One is “Christmas With Morris and Boris,” an excruciating tale about a simple-minded moose and a bear who schools him in holiday basics. The primary narrative tension is the increasing anger of the bear who, incredulous at the stupidity of the moose, finally loses it when Morris mistakes Santa’s beard for white feathers.

The story leans heavily on a series of terrible puns such as “Merry Kiss-Moose.” The sweet spot for this story is someone with the sense of humor of an 8-year-old, the approximate age of our oldest son when my husband began to stage an annual reading.

What no one can explain is why at the ages of 23 and 26, these “children” still insist on hearing “Christmas With Morris and Boris” read aloud every Christmas Eve.

My family observes some distinctive gift-giving traditions, one that is based on an event from the mid-20th century when my parents gave a pair of pocket knives in a glass presentation case to the 8- and 9-year-old sons of our neighbors, the Whitesells.

We learned later that moments after receiving the knives, the children were bloody. By the time of our next get-together, the gifts had been confiscated and the scars on the boys’ hands were healing nicely. To this day, such gifting is referred to in our family as being “Whiteselled.”

For example, my parents’ gift to my oldest son on his second Christmas was a plastic train large enough to ride around the house, with wheels that emitted a chugging sound and a button on the smokestack that unleashed a piercing whistle. Our boy called it “The Wake-Up Train.” There was no peace in our home until we took it away.

A related tradition on my husband’s side of the family is the “Forman’s Folly,” a gift that seems at first like the solution to a problem, but proves to be so useless or inconvenient that it ends up in the basement. For example, the coffee bean roaster of 1988, which achieved temperatures hot enough to vaporize hair, but took hours to roast a handful of raw coffee beans. And try finding someone to sell you unroasted coffee beans.

This year’s Forman’s Folly was the digital grill thermometer that is flameproof to 450 degrees and communicates with the chef via Smartphone. This gift resulted in the griller being summoned from in front of the television in the middle of a critical third-down play when the London broil reached 145 degrees and his phone made a noise like a tornado warning.

Towards the end of many weeks of festivities, I took my older son to the ferry so he could go back to his job in New York. He is one of the family’s more vocal critics, especially on the subjects of sustainability; “What a ridiculous waste of boxes and paper,” and lightly-spiced food, “Pass the Sriracha!” As we waited I asked, “Do you have any final, parting criticisms?”

“No, it was great to be with you,” he said. “But next year, more Morris and Boris.”

12/03/2015

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO | Jerry Glassberg in his studio, with his ‘maquette’ for a sculpture of the 17th century Shelter Island Quaker Mary Dyer.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on November 19, 2015

Jerry Glassberg is a retired businessman, closing in on five decades of living on Shelter Island. Now in his 80s, he’s in the middle of his second act as a writer and sculptor. “I retired very early,” he said, “Terribly early.”

Considering his mother lived to 106, Jerry figured he might need a second career.

He grew up in Long Beach and met his wife-to-be, Tamara Chapman, on the beach. He was a lifeguard who looked pretty great in swim trunks. She was a ballet dancer from Ohio who had moved to New York to dance with the internationally renowned Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

“I met her, and within half an hour it was like a cartoon, like someone banged me over the head,” he said. “I was crazy in love with her.”

Tamara toured extensively with the Ballet Russe, and performed in the original Broadway production of “Paint Your Wagon” in 1951/52. They married in 1953. Jerry described their relative stations in life with his hands, “I’m here,” he gestured low. “She’s up there. But you have on a lifeguard suit and a whistle, you can talk to the most glamorous woman in the world.”

Not long after they married Jerry came close to dying. Not quite recovered from an illness that left him bedridden for days, he decided to go to work on a Saturday. When a swimmer needed help, he took over the rescue.

But he got to the swimmer in trouble, just as he realized his illness had sapped his strength, and was suddenly in need of rescue himself. “I said to one of the guys, ‘Take over for me,’” he remembered. “I was much too macho to say, ‘I’m sick, help me in.”

He swam away, but lacking the strength to swim to shore, he began to sink, and when he came up, didn’t have the breath to yell for help. “I gave up,” he said. Going down for what he thought was the last time, he found he was in three feet of water, and crawled to shore. “I never worked another day as a lifeguard,” he said. “I was too embarrassed.”

The epitome of a self-starter, Jerry decided to create his own business from the ground up, “I wrote a letter to 35 pottery and dish manufacturers and said I’d like to represent them, and a couple of them answered,” he said. “I’m a big talker. I walked the streets of Brooklyn with 60 pounds of samples.”

Early in his career, Jerry remembered being in a buyer’s office when an older salesman came in and the buyer — young and brash — treated the older man with disrespect. “The buyers, they have the power,” Jerry said, “I remember standing there and thinking, ‘I’ll never get in that position. I’ll never get where a little snapper can talk to me like that.’”

By the early 1970s, Jerry’s import/export pottery business was flourishing, he and Tamara were living near the city, and they started to look for a weekend home. Visiting Greenport one day, Tamara suggested they take the ferry over to Shelter Island. “It was like when the Wizard of Oz goes into

Technicolor,” Jerry said. “Wow, golf course, tennis courts, sailing.”

They found one fault with Shelter Island, Jerry joked. “Your income goes down, because you start taking off Fridays and then you start taking off Mondays.” In 1985, Jerry retired and they began living full time in a house they had built on Lakeview Drive.

The couple had two children, Leslie and Neil. Their daughter Leslie worked for NBC as a production manager for the Seoul Olympics and for Saturday Night Live. After more than a decade at NBC Leslie told her father, “I go to the bathroom and 10 people follow me … I’m thinking of quitting.” She left NBC to establish a successful yoga practice. Neil is a businessman based in Bahrain and is the father of four.

Upon retirement, Jerry rediscovered his love for sculpture, a form of artistic expression he’d enjoyed earlier in life, but had put aside. He did several commissions in the 1990s — portrait busts of notable people, such as Lester Brooks, former president of Timex Watch Company, and George Willis, a professor at the University of Toledo. He has also depicted notable Shelter Islanders, including Jack Ketcham and Dr. Peter Kelt.

In 2001, Jerry endured great sadness in an otherwise happy and fortunate life when Tamara passed away at the age of 70 after an 18-month illness. They had been married for 47 years.

Jerry has created garden sculptures for a number of private homes on the South Fork and Shelter Island, as well as nudes of every size and bearing. Some of his works are on display in his own yard, including a large white rabbit at the head of the driveway and a naked pair of lovers out by the patio whose anatomy conveys the excitement of their romance. Jerry smiled in recollection of the effect that sculpture had on a Garden Club party touring the property.

Jerry has also written and self-published three books of both fiction as well as non-fiction, and is working on a fourth book on the life of Frank Seiberling, co-founder of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.

10/05/2015

Jonathan Russo at ‘Sleeping Foxes,’ the name of his and his wife Deborah Grayson’s home in the Heights. CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on September 10, 2015

In Genesis when new things were created, they got named. Jonathan Russo, advertising executive, talent developer, entrepreneur, sailor and long-time Shelter Island resident is really good at naming things.

For example, at the Shingle-style home in Shelter Island Heights he shares with his wife Deborah Grayson, Jonathan recounted, “I woke up one morning in January, and saw two sleeping foxes in the snow, spooning together. After that we named the house “Sleeping Foxes.”

Born in Brooklyn to Jack and Miriam Russo, Jonathan grew up in Roslyn with his brother, Seth, and sister, Emily. In 1957, his father brought five-year-old Jonathan to Shelter Island for a boys’ weekend at the Chequit that included a motorboat outing in Dering Harbor. It would take Jonathan a couple of decades to return, but when he did, it was boating that lured him.

In his 30s, with little sailing experience, Jonathan decided, “sailing would be my passion in life.” He bought a boat and christened it Wu wei for the Taoist principle that translates, “Go with the wind and go with the flow.” He is now on his fourth boat, Sachem.

Jonathan graduated from Roslyn High School, but just barely. From the age of six, he was plagued with what he termed “fairly severe learning disabilities,” including attention deficit disorder, for which he took medication. Numbers were not his forte, but words and reading books were his retreat.

While many of his high school friends went off to Ivy League schools, Jonathan enrolled at Suffolk University in Boston, driving a cab at night to help support himself. He also learned out of necessity to cook and feed himself, since his college had no dorms or dining hall, and credits this experience with initiating what would be a life-long fascination with meal preparation, wine and farmers markets.

“In 1969, the markets in Boston were frequented by Portuguese and Italian people, “who would not eat crappy processed food,” Jonathan said. “It was for immigrants, but I was down there every week buying food for me and my friends.”

After graduating in 1972, Jonathan came back to New York. “The call of business was very powerful,” he said. “My father was a businessman.”

From 1973 to 1978 Jonathan was in the thick of the New York advertising world just past the height of its power and licentiousness, but close enough for the 23-year-old to experience the three-martini lunch more than once. An account executive at Foote Cone and Belding, he moved to legendary BBDO and finally to the giant InterPublic firm. “I recognize Mad Men very closely,” he said.

Itching to get away from working conditions he saw as too corporate, Jonathan left advertising in 1978 to represent the brothers Albert and David Maysles, documentary filmmakers whose films, “Grey Gardens” and “Gimme Shelter” had brought them acclaim. Six months later, the business relationship ended in total failure.

“I had no prospects. I was backed into a corner,” he said. “I couldn’t believe that this was happening to me, but it was happening.”

Jonathan said the experience changed his approach to work and life. “I never assume I can’t have a setback,” he said. “I was taught the bitter lesson that sometimes things just don’t work out and you can be punished for that, and I was.”

He landed at William Morris, an agency he called, “the heartbeat of show business,” and where he worked until 1983, leaving to start Artists Agency, Inc. with a partner.

At Artists Agency, Jonathan said, they purposefully concentrated on soap operas and reality TV shows such as “Inside Edition,” “Current Affair,” “Hard Copy” and “Judge Judy” rather than scripted television, which was mainly produced in Los Angeles as a strategy for keeping the business in New York. As soap operas faded from television, the agency shifted to developing programming for the Food Network including Sandra Lee, Paula Deen and “The Chew” with Mario Batali.

“We are still at it,” Jonathan said, although “it’s not appropriate for me to sell television shows anymore because everybody buying them is 28. They say, ‘Grandpa is here to sell something?’”

Jonathan’s learning disabilities affected him in an obvious way when he was a kid in school. More subtle was the effect on the kind of work he chose to do as an adult. “I’m not in a fact-based industry,” he said. “I was able to use my intelligence and gift of people skills, insight into human nature and business acumen in a way that is entrepreneurial rather than structured because I couldn’t compete with people with real defined skill sets. I left the factual, brilliant part of the world to my wife.”

Deborah Grayson and Jonathan met in the early 1980s when Deborah was between jobs, working at a company Jonathan was doing business with.

“I couldn’t believe she was the new receptionist, she was only there for a week. We fell in lust,” he said. “Later it turned to love.” They have been married for 26 years.

Deborah is a hospice nutritionist for Visiting Nurse Service in New York and is an active supporter of East End Hospice through fundraising and writing about EEH services to raise awareness of the good work it does.

Jonathan and Deborah started to come to Shelter Island regularly around the time he was starting his business. “We were so poor, I had to drive to my parents’ house to sleep at night in Roslyn,” he remembered. “The next year I did a little better and we could afford to stay in Greenport for $29 a night at the Greenporter, and the next year we did a little better and stayed at the Ram’s Head.”

Next, they upgraded to a one-bedroom cottage on Fresh Pond, where they stayed five months of the year for 14 years, until they built the house in the Heights in 2000.

“I came here to go sailing, and I’m on the water every single minute that I can,” he said.

At Coecles Harbor for almost 20 years and the Shelter Island Yacht Club for the past 16, he credits Coecles Harbor and Steve Corkery with turning him into a sailor. “They taught me everything I know,” he said.Jonathan calls Coecles Harbor “a fair trade marina.”

To him, that means fair pay for the skilled workers and craftsmen that build, repair and preserve the boats. He points out that the mechanics, carpenters and electricians all have pensions and healthcare.

We’ve all heard of community involvement, also known as giving back. The ad man in Jonathan shows itself when he labeled the give-and-take between him and Shelter Island, “The immediacy of the community.”

For example, Jonathan wrote a boating column called “The Float” for the Reporter for many years. When Amanda Clark became an Olympic champion, he asked to interview her and “the next thing I knew, I was interviewing her and working on her fundraiser.”

Immediacy of the community is also when, in the days before 1991’s Hurricane Bob, Jonathan and Deborah worked to protect their boat, as well as the boats of others, at the Coecles Harbor Marina, volunteering to help in any way they could. It was all hands on deck as the marina prepared for the storm and Deborah and Jonathan were with them, tying lines and getting supplies.

Jonathan described how he and Deborah, with four other families in 2002, helped to preserve Hampshire Farms as a rural horse farm by purchasing the property in a deal that was part of the Open Space initiative with Peconic Land Trust.

In March, Jonathan funded a new benefit called “Honoring the Hands” for Hudson River Healthcare, a network of healthcare service providers that works with the poor and uninsured — people who in Suffolk County are very likely to be farm workers, maids and child care workers. The very first event raised about $70,000 to support the health of these workers.

“I wasn’t particularly religious when I came here, but I am religious now. I’ve become an animist,” he said, referring to the belief that was characteristic of many Native American cultures, believing there are spirits in nature. “In October I watch the sunset while I’m swimming, or I sail around the Island and I feel like I’ve had an epiphany,” he said.

“I can’t believe how lucky I am that in my early 60s , I have a dozen friends I’ve made since I’ve lived here, adult friendships,” he said. “There are so many people here who are interesting and talented. I am so blessed.”

Maggie Murphy was enjoying the quiet beauty and significant snow cover of a February Shelter Island weekend with her husband David, daughter Maeve, and a nine-month-old Goldendoodle named Ellie, when two visitors broke trail through a foot of ice and snow, tramped into their home and left dripping boots in a mound by the front door.

“Would somebody throw my pants up to me?” Maggie yelled. David wadded up a pair of jeans and fired them upstairs.

Next to Sundance, the Oscars and the White House Christmas party, all of which Maggie has experienced, her Shelter Island life is less red carpet and more Stainmaster.

Maggie’s distinguished publishing career spans decades as reporter, editor and industry leader at Us, Entertainment Weekly, Life, People, Parade and starting last month, theMid.com. She has told the stories of every kind of American, from single moms working at Wal-Mart to Barack and Michelle Obama working at the White House.

Maggie was born into a large Irish family in Queens. Her four siblings still live within a few miles of where they all grew up in Woodside. “My parents were immigrants in the mid 50s, a good time to be Irish in America,” she said. “People knew us in our small neighborhood, knew my mother, knew who my family was.”

Maggie got her start in journalism at a New York City public school, Bryant High. A self-described “good Catholic girl,” when her English teacher asked to see her after class, she assumed she’d done something wrong. He told her she should join the newspaper, “The Bryant Clipper.”

“I was fascinated by the immigrant story I saw on TV,” Maggie said, referring to Rose Ann Scamardella, an Italian-American woman who anchored WABC Eyewitness News in New York City in the late 1970s. “I had a hardscrabble upbringing, my dad was an alcoholic,” Maggie said. “I didn’t want to be around too many sad things. Rose Ann Scamardella looked like she was having fun. I wanted to do that.”

As for college, “There really wasn’t a path in my everyday life,” said Maggie. In her junior year at Bryant, an adviser asked if she was going to college, and when she demurred, answered the question for her. “I was sort of adopted by the English department, they helped me apply, and I ended up getting into NYU,” she said.

Maggie worked at an NYU school newspaper, an alternative weekly. There she met David Browne, who would later become her husband. “He wanted to be a music critic, and I said, ‘Oh wow, you can do that? I’ll try that,’” she said. “We became very focused on how to make our way in the publishing business.”

At first, Maggie and David struggled the way many college grads do. “We had a series of the most unfortunate jobs,” she said.

But every job had something to teach her. At Teen Beat, Maggie learned not to ruin the magazine cover by using the word “flick,” which creates an unfortunate visual impression when viewed in passing. She said, “Years later, when I worked at Entertainment Weekly, this became the Maggie Murphy rule, ‘Don’t put the word flick on the cover.’”

In the late 1980s when clothing retailers were hiring magazine journalists to study color swatches of their apparel and come up with evocative names, Maggie found herself in the middle of the J.Crew and Tweeds “color war.” She went to work for J. Crew after the defection of a team of writers to Tweeds.

“They liked colors like ‘emotion’ for gray,” said Maggie. “At J. Crew, they’d give you a swatch, and you would think, that’s orange, but orange is boring so let’s call it kumquat, or call it ‘team’ for navy blue. It was a wacky, visual job.”

She and David had married and they had a mortgage, so when a magazine job at Us came her way, she took it. Over the next 20 years, she worked in the intense, competitive, and sometimes glamorous world of publishing. She was named “Hottest Editor of the Year” in 2011.

Maggie interviewed Michelle Obama several times and President Obama twice. “They are both impossibly good-looking in person, very tall,” she said. “The president is hard to interview because you get 20 minutes and his answer to every question is 10 minutes long, and you wonder, do I interrupt the leader of the free world?”

In the early 1990s Maggie and David started coming to Shelter Island on weekends when their friend Kathy Heintzelman, who still lives on the Island, invited them to share a house near North Ferry with a tribe of friends, colleagues and competitors from the city.

“My boss at Entertainment Weekly used to call it the ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’ house,” Maggie said. Since then, they’ve continued to live weekends, year-round on the Island, buying their own place in 2000.Maggie and David had Maeve in 2002, when Maggie was close to 40.

She found that having a child deepened her ties to the community, especially the Shelter Island Library. “On Saturday afternoons in the winter, we’d go and read books,” she said. “It’s one of my favorite places, a wonderful institution.”

During her time at Parade, Maggie’s professional life and personal life seemed to come together on Shelter Island. “The thing I cherish most is the way the Island is like so many towns that I visited at Parade — the importance of education, the paper, the library to small town life.”

In the fall of 2014 Maggie was displaced at Parade when the company was sold. “This was the first time in 27 years I’d had to look for a job, something that a lot of people my age have grappled with,” she said. “It makes you reassess where you want to live, how you want to live, what your work life means to you.”

With Maeve’s help, Maggie concluded that work outside the home is vital to her happiness. After leaving Parade, she began to meet Maeve at the school bus, and ask how her day had gone. One day after listening for a while, “the boss in me came roaring back and I said, ‘O.K., here’s how this is going to work. You are going to give me 10 minutes on everything that went wrong and then you are going to tell me how you are going fix it.’”

‘Mommy,’ Maeve said, ‘You need to go back to work.’”

Now working at a startup called theMid.com, Maggie described her job as being the adult in a big room of journalists writing about “the messy middle” of people’s lives: jobs, children, transitions and parents.

She sees some of the changes in her decades here on Shelter Island as improvements. “The glue of the Island is its livability 365 days of the year. I’m mindful of that,” she said. “Stars Café changed the Heights. It’s great to have Black Cat Books and it’s been wonderful to see a Farmers Market and Sylvester Manor. The chicken salad at the Eagle Deli is awesome.”

“To become someone who has a great job, who can have a house on Shelter Island, and be able to live in the city, it is the expression of the American Dream,” she said. “I think it’s so much about teachers tapping you on the shoulder and saying ‘you are good at this, you should do this.’ Ordinary people doing ordinary things make the biggest difference in our lives.”

08/05/2014

In some ways, Robert Lipsyte is unremarkable. Born in the Bronx in 1938, he grew up in Rego Park, Queens and went to Forest Hills High School. And after many years living in New Jersey and the Upper West Side, raising two children, and working very hard, he now lives on West Neck Road with his wife, Lois B. Morris, and a handsome, elderly spaniel named Milo.

Unremarkable until you read his remarks.

Because for over 50 years, in novels for young adults and as a journalist, Robert has been writing about the American experience — mainly through the lens of sports — with humanity, wit and acumen. He’s the smart kid in the back of the classroom, armed with a peashooter.

Seated at the dining table in a bright room, Robert is speaking frankly. When Lois suggests a modicum of restraint, he responds, “The dog is here. I can’t lie.”

Prize-winning sports reporter and columnist at the New York Times, winner of the 2001 Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association for lifetime contribution to Young Adult Literature, and runner-up for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary, Robert is currently working for ESPN as ombudsman, where he has recused himself from Twitter in part because “I have a tendency to pop off.”

To hear Robert tell it, his start in journalism was typical of the time. “At the Times in 1957 if you were a white guy with a tie and no tics you could find a job and work your way up … I’ve been really lucky about accidentally falling into great jobs without the kind of career planning I would advise for young kids.”

Luck, or is it an uncanny ability to show up at events just as all hell breaks loose? Like the time he was sent to cover a fight between Sonny Liston and a kid named Cassius Clay, because the regular Times sports writer was too busy and Liston was obviously going to whip Clay. Or the time he was sent to cover his first NASCAR race and realized that Dale Earnhardt had been killed when, “Someone ran out and threw a blue tarp over his car and everyone in the press box started to cry.”

Or when Robert went to work for the New York Post in 1977, shortly after Rupert Murdoch took over … and lasted seven months.

About that he said, “Rupert finally read me.” Hired as the city columnist, Robert found he could write whatever he wanted as long as it did not conflict with the Murdoch political agenda; anything that did would be cut out.

One night, after learning his column had been altered in this way, Robert had enough. He left his resignation letter on Murdoch’s desk and went over to Channel 2 where his friend Dave Marash was an anchorman for the CBS 11 o’clock news. “I guess I whined to him,” Robert said. “Marash said, ‘If you ever want to quit, how would you like to quit on the 11 o’clock news?’ It was a slow news night. I found out that more people heard me announce my resignation that night than had ever read me in my life, books, magazines and newspapers. It was a revelation.”

Robert first came to Shelter Island with his family in the 70s. “We visited and guested and rented and in the early 90s bought a house.” He and Lois live in “her house” on West Neck Road, adding a room in the basement where Robert works and some woods in the back for Milo to defend. “So I’m guesting once again.”

Robert’s daughter, Susannah, is an attorney, married, living in Brooklyn and the mother of a two-year-old. His son Sam lives on the Upper West Side and is chairman of the graduate writing program at Columbia University. “My son is a famous writer. The dynamic in the family has shifted,” he said. “A few years back he would show me stuff before he sent it in, now I show him stuff. I love it. I think vicarious pleasures are the best pleasures.”

Vicarious pleasures are what Robert has given to countless parents, as they’ve seen their children — especially sons — pick up his books and start reading like doctoral candidates. Before there was Harry Potter, there was “The Contender” and “One Fat Summer”; compelling stories that acknowledge the dark and troubling moral challenges in sports and growing up in a way young readers can understand.

His latest work, “The Twin Powers,” is science fiction for middle-school- age kids, coming out in October. “I wanted to see if I could write a book without sex or drugs — something that my grandchildren could read. And I wanted to try different voices and have a woman character. It was written on Shelter Island in a wonderful bubble of quietude.”

In his fiction and non-fiction writing, Robert examines the American obsession with boys and sports, a phenomenon he calls “jock culture.” He said, “Kids really should play sports. But parents have to figure out how they can understand, that even though sports heroes seem to be live and in color, they are movie stars.”

Lance Armstrong is one of many such heroes that Robert met over his career. He described Armstrong with characteristic humanity, saying, “I thought from the beginning that Lance was doping and I didn’t care. To go up the Pyrenees without chemical help is crazy … He lied of course. But he was a hard case and I kind of respected him. He’s a tough guy, even looking at you across the table, there was nothing soft or sweet or ingratiating about him. But his foundation was spectacular. He helped an awful lot of people.

When they stripped him of his seven titles, it became impossible to replace him because everyone all the way down were dopers themselves.”

Robert sees two levels of sports; one is the Yankees or Mets, the Tour de France, the World Cup (“they are not such good guys”) and the other is “the Bucks on down. Positive values.”

He celebrates sports that involve real human accomplishment, not mixed up with entertainment and big money. “What could be better than the Shelter Island girls volleyball team? That’s kind of a human treasure. And that’s sports … a great coach … look how hard they worked. That didn’t just happen.” he said, “They’ve gotten something out of that experience that will serve them the rest of their lives.”

“When we hold athletic heroes up as models we should hold them up as models for work ethic, for dedication to goals, for collective play, and not some delusional fantasy we have of their character.”

Robert’s current job as ombudsman for ESPN puts him in the thick of the moral issues he’s been commenting on for his entire career, such as the controversy over brain damage among NFL players as a result of repeated concussions. Pro football generates more income for ESPN than any other sport, so how does ESPN go about covering a story that threatens the very identity of the sport?

“That’s an ombudsman issue, and that’s why an outside critic is a good thing,” he said. “And I have been critical.”

The view of the Island as merely a charming paradise does not make sense to Robert. He sees much more complexity here. “Shelter Island is special but it is also a microcosm of the world … There are a lot of different communities, wonderful and enriching and sometimes they interact,” he said. “It’s Peyton Place with plovers. It’s people whose kids go to school here, who work here, it’s a thriving artistic community, retirees and writers.”

He also includes the people who come for the summer and “leave their money here.”

“I love this place. I love it for the physical beauty. There are interesting people here. You get to talking to somebody semi-retired, some guy who comes along and it turns out he was an underwater demolition expert in WWII and he blew up the world!”

Robert loves the Shelter Island “gems,” like the Perlman Music Program, Project FIT, Sylvester Manor, the Mashomack Preserve, the Bucks, and the fireworks. “Anything that’s a community campfire, that brings people together in a glad moment is really a great positive,” he said. “My job is to eat the marshmallows.”

“I love it for the quietude. I love it for a sense of sanctuary here for me,” he added. “At my age and for how I live it’s almost perfect. I say almost perfect, because if I said that Shelter Island is perfect, a tree would fall down on the house tonight.”